Donald Lee Nickles (born December 6, 1948) is an American politician and lobbyist who was a Republican United States Senator from Oklahoma from 1981 to 2005.

To help pay for their education at Oklahoma State University, he and his wife, the former Linda Lou Morrison, operated Don Nickles Professional Cleaning Service in Stillwater.

He was a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity at Oklahoma State University, and earned a Bachelor of Arts in business administration in 1971.

[6][7][8][9][10] A formative experience was the distress his family suffered following the death of his father, Robert, in 1961, when Nickles was twelve years old.

[14] The National Federation of Independent Business praised Nickles for including in the Senate's 2005 budget a provision that would accelerate by one year a complete repeal of the federal estate tax[15] Nickles was one of many Republican senators who in 1981 called the White House to express his discontent over the nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor of Arizona to the United States Supreme Court.

Nickles said that he and other socially conservative Republican senators would not support O'Connor because of her "presumed unwillingness" to overturn the abortion decision Roe v.

[16] During a 1986 campaign rally at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, President Reagan accidentally called him Don Rickles, the American comedian.

After being term-limited out of the Assistant Leader position, Nickles served in the 108th Congress as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.